Stock System Review

Our goal here is to provide an enhanced driving experience to those purchasing our Mini Cooper air intake. Let’s jump into the stock intake to see what we’re working with!

The factory air-box is a fairly standard design. There is a mass airflow sensor right after the airbox, so an aftermarket intake that won’t require a tune would need to stay within the stock piping diameter threshold.

With any larger piping, the MAF won’t properly read the increased airflow without being taught how to do so, causing the vehicle to run incorrectly. This can also cause potential damage to the engine. You can also see the stock air duct that is attached to the front of the airbox, which is a feature we intend to incorporate in our design.

Check out the tube going back towards the turbo. In our initial research, we wanted to replace this accordion-style tube. But when we actually got the car in to inspect the system, we saw that the last metal clamp on the tube closest to the firewall is crushed from factory to secure the connection between the tubes. This wouldn’t be easy to take off, requiring replacing everything back to the turbo, which would make install very involved.

We then considered the owners who might put our intake into their vehicles. For an easier install, it made sense to leave the tube where it sits. The focus was now on the filter and shield designs.

The box design is straightforward, as you can see below in the stock inlet that grabs its fresh air from the front scoop. Also check out the sensor placed right before the box. Our design will have a CNC MAF adapter on the tube to keep the MAF sensor in place and reading straight airflow.

Coming Up!

We just got this car into our garage and the design ideas are already flowing! Our engineers are working on creating an effective design for a heatshield. Take a sneak peek at their initial design below!

Parts Fabrication

Usually, when it comes to creating the pieces to a heat shield, our process involved measuring twice and cutting once with the use of a band-saw, shears and a bender. It was laborious and time-consuming.

With this project, we took a slightly different approach during the design and prototyping phase of our heat shield R&D. After capturing the dimensions we needed from the vehicle, a prototype design was drawn in 3D modeling software. Once completed, we used our waterjet machine to cut the shapes out of the steel metal sheets.

If you don’t know about the waterjet, it is an apparatus for precision cutting using highly pressurized water. Virtually any shape on a flat plane can be made – small or large – limited only by the designer’s imagination. Check out an image of the cutting process below. The images on the screen are pieces of the intake box for this Mini Cooper S.

Now let’s check out some of the shield being cut!

Once the procedure is finished, we can take the Mini Cooper air intake piece out one by one to clean them up and grind down the sharp, freshly cut edges.

These flat metal sheets will be accurately bent to the correct angle. Our fabricator measures the exact angle and bends them on our sheet metal bender.

After the pieces are cut and bent, they are assembled and welded in place so the shield can finally start to take shape. This entire method has been a much faster and easier way of box/shield construction – it made our previous methods seem primitive!

Once all of that is complete, we are now ready to fit the shield into the space.

The pipe was fairly simple since it’s short, but we used a sizeable filter to support ample airflow. A MAF (mass airflow) adapter will be included with the pipe, so for this prototype, we 3D-printed an adapter. Let’s look at how it sits in the box!

Our intake dramatically improves the induction sound. The turbo spool is much more pronounced over stock and the intake tone is more aggressive. We know that this is as important for Mini drivers as performance, so we devoted time to making sure that this intake sounds awesome.

The way this intake is designed fully maxes out airflow potential that the engine sees. It is less restrictive than the stock unit while still making use of the factory air duct. Our team went through a few different variations of this intake design, all of them yielding the same results – power output similar to stock. In situations like this, if the product just isn’t going to make pronounced power gains, there is no shame in saying so. The Mishimoto team will not falsify dyno charts and claim something makes power when in reality it doesn’t.

At the moment, our Engineering team hasn’t found a viable solution to increasing power through an intake that would be safe to run on a stock tune. Although our intake may not increase the horsepower your 2014+ Mini Cooper S sees, it does do a few things well. As you seen in the sound clips, this intake improves the induction sound and also provides the potential for more power later on down the road along with other upgrades. The way these Mini Cooper parts look under the hood is also important here since it is a very noticeable part of the engine bay. This design is simple, yet effective, complete with a show-quality finish.

What’s Next?

We have a finished prototype complete with paint ready to go! Want to see what it looks like? Check out a sneak peek of it below.

With the prototype done and fitted into the bay, we are that much closer to presale time. During this time, you can get one of these intake kits at a  discounted price before it officially hits the market. Keep an eye out for when this presale goes live – it will be soon!